The Flowers

In her poetry, Emily Dickinson used the word noon to mean more than “the middle of the day” or “the time of day when a main meal is eaten.” She also used the word to symbolic effect to mean, at times, “the highest point of life” or “the culmination of something,” according to the Emily Dickinson Archive. Consider the time of day in Alice Walker’s “The Flowers.” How might you define the symbolic potential of twelve o’clock in context?

This story was included in the collection In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women. Consider, in contrast, that Myop is only 10 years old. In what ways is her encounter with the hanged man foundational to her becoming a Black woman? What lessons about love and trouble might she take with her into her Black womanhood?

The text does not reveal a great deal about Myop’s emotions after she steps into the dead man’s eyes: a moment of “surprise” and later a spark of “interest” directed not at the body but at the spot surrounding him. What is the narrative function of Walker’s revealing so little about Myop’s reactions? How does this authorial choice prepare the reader for the final sentence of the story?

In Paragraph 7, the focus of the narrative shifts to the dead man. Whose voice or understanding are readers being made privy to in these sentences? Is this the narrator who grants the reader an objective appraisal of the man? If so, what is the effect of removing Myop almost entirely from the scene? Alternatively, is this a subjective look at the man that unfolds from Myop’s perspective? If so, what about her emotional reaction to the man can you infer from the description of him?

Consider the “short, knobby stick” (Paragraph 2) that Myop carries around with her. Is this an object of fancy or of necessity? What does it reveal to you about the socioeconomic circumstances in which Myop lives? Cite evidence from the text for support.

The sudden introduction to and presence of a hanged man in this story may inspire feelings of shock, horror, or disgust in readers. What may be Walker’s purpose in stoking such reactions in her readers? More broadly, what may be the value of shock, horror, and disgust in tales about the Jim Crow South?

In the first sentence, Walker creates a sense of the expansiveness of Myop’s world by tracing where she has been. Continue tracing Myop’s steps throughout the story. In what ways does her world expand along the journey? In what ways does her world contract and collapse?

Myop chooses to pick “common but pretty” ferns and leaves, and “strange” flowers and bushes (Paragraph 4). What do these choices reveal about her burgeoning appreciation of the beauty of the natural world? How might her experience of the “strangeness of the land” (Paragraph 5) have altered these early impressions?